Over the last few years, there have been many advances in semiconductor technology which have resulted in the development of improved graphic controllers operating at higher frequencies and supporting additional and/or enhanced features. While these advances have enabled hardware manufacturers to design and build faster and more sophisticated graphics cards and computers, they also pose a disadvantage to battery-powered laptop and handheld computers. In particular, these battery-powered computers consume more power and dissipate more heat as a by-product than those past generation computers.
Within a graphics memory controller hub for example, a graphic core is one of its major functional blocks having a large gate count. Hence, power consumption by the graphics memory controller hub is primarily correlated to the voltage and frequency applied to the graphics core. Namely, as the graphics core voltage increases, the power consumed by the graphics memory controller hub increases as well. Since utilization of the graphics core can vary significantly from application to application, computers are unnecessarily wasting power when supplying high voltages and frequency signaling to the graphics core to process applications having minimal graphics. This will unnecessarily reduce battery life of laptop and hand-held computers as well as cause these computers to operate at unnecessarily high temperatures.